In this issue of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy Clinics of North America, guest editors Drs. Kenneth J. Chang and Jason B. Samarasena bring their considerable expertise to the topic of The Endoscopic Oncologist. The practice of gastrointestinal endoscopy intersects with oncology in many ways, much of it involving pre-cancerous conditions. But the endoscopist's role in diagnosing, staging, and treating cancer patients is expanding. This issue is devoted to the current and future role of the endoscopic oncologist, with topics such as endoscopic diagnosis of luminal gastrointestinal cancer and extra-luminal cancer; endoscopic resection for early cancer; and more. Contains 12 relevant, practice-oriented topics including endoscopic ultrasound cancer staging; management of biliary obstruction; endoscopic management of colonic obstruction; endoscopic treatment of tumor bleeding; endoscopic ultrasound-guided pain management; and more. Provides in-depth clinical reviews on the endoscopic oncologist, offering actionable insights for clinical practice. Presents the latest information on this timely, focused topic under the leadership of experienced editors in the field. Authors synthesize and distill the latest research and practice guidelines to create clinically significant, topic-based reviews.

This unique book succinctly summarizes the need to measure how ontologies (one of the building blocks of the Semantic Web) are currently being utilized, providing insights for various stakeholders. Where possible it improves and reuses terms in existing vocabularies/ontologies, as recommended by the Linked Data community. Recent advances in the Semantic Web have led to a proliferation of Resource Description Framework (RDF) data, which employ ontologies to semantically describe the information on the Web making it equally understandable for both humans and machines. However, to create a network effect, it is important that selective ontologies are used by more data publishers to improve the value of that ontology. For this to happen, it is vital to discover what is being used from an ontology to semantically annotate the information on the Web specific to a given domain. Answers to such basic but crucial questions can only be achieved by ascertaining how ontologies in the current semantic web are being utilized and adopted. The proposed frameworks to obtain such insights are explained with real-world examples to provide a clear and detailed description of ontology usage analysis. Both theoretical and practical, the book is of value to academics and professionals working in industry. Specifically, it is of primary interest to researchers, graduate students and practitioners in the area of the Semantic Web and its various real-world applications.

Risk and reward are always foremost in the determination of investment decisions and business transactions. Advances in the area of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) have enabled the development of new business paradigms. Such paradigms involve transactions taking place between loosely connected parties, often totally or partially unknown to one another. One important concept required to ensure such transactions are successful is transactional risk. The importance of doing this has been demonstrated in recent financial crisis. This book is unique in simultaneously taking into account the likelihood of an event occurring and its financial impact and provides an integrated discussion of the process of transactional risk identification, assessment, evaluation, management and recording in these emerging domains. It provides a detailed and clear exposition of the importance of transactional risk before detailing for its assessment and evaluation. The scope of the book is theoretical and practical and as such it will have a broad market both within academia and industry. Specifically this book should be of primary interest to researchers, graduate students and practitioners in the area of developing business intelligence techniques and their application in various real world applications.

The Korean culture and the impact of the geopolitical environment of the Korean peninsula have produced a unique behavioral pattern in both managers and workers. It is necessary to understand this behavioral pattern in order to understand the Korean management system that has played such a major role in contributing to the phenomenal economic achievement of the Korean business community. Entrepreneurs, top executives, managers and workers are all integral parts of the management system, and their performance is given an in-depth analysis.

After introducing the reader to the Chinese and Japanese cultures that share a common Oriental heritage with the Korean culture, the authors discuss the geopolitical influences of the major powers: China, Russia, Japan, and the United States. The Koreans first learned modern management principles from the Japanese, and following World War II, from the Americans. Later, the Korean government actively supported businesses' survival and prosperity. The various entrepreneurial management styles influence the development of Korea's modern managers as well. The impact of the group and individual behavior of Koreans, the evolution of the chaebol, the management of human resources, and the Office of Planning and Control are explored in depth. The very special ethical issues that surround Korean business dealings are also given particular attention. Top executives, managers, and entrepreneurs doing business in Korea or with Korean businessmen will be interested in this book's discussion of the Korean management system. This book will make excellent supplemental reading material in international business, human resource, and strategic management courses.

Recent years have seen the development of two significant trends namely: the adoption of some Traditional Chinese Medicine Practices into mainstream Allopathic Western Medicine and the advent of the internet and broad band networks leading to an increased interest in the use of Telemedicine to deliver medical services. In this book, we see the convergence of these two trends leading to a semantically-based TCM Telemedicine system that utilizes an ontology to provide sharable knowledge in the TCM realm to achieve this. The underpinning research required the development of a three-layer architecture and an Ontology of the TCM knowledge. As TCM knowledge like all medical knowledge is not frozen in time it was important to develop an approach that would allow evolution of the Ontology when new evidence became available. In order for the system to be practically grounded it was important to work with an industry partner PuraPharm Group/HerbMiners Informatics Limited. This partnership was initiated through Professor Allan Wong and the Chairman of PuraPharm Group Mr. Abraham Chan. This led to the system being utilized in more than 20 Mobile Clinics in Hong Kong and 300 Hospitals in China. In order for these different deployments of the system to be coherent with the main core Ontology, it was necessary for us to develop an Ontology Driven Software System Generation approach.

The development of the Chinese MNC is a new feature of globalization, one that will undoubtedly change the world. Why do Chinese firms internationalize, how do they do so, and what will be the impact of their internationalization on developed markets are the foci of this book.

Be ready with specific evidence when you present patient plans during medical rounds! Concise and easy to use, Introduction to Evidence-Based Medicine: Key Summaries for Common Medical Practices simplifies the complexity of clinical studies using key landmark trials in the core medicine specialties. Ideal for those early in their medical education and career, this portable guide helps you make the most of your limited time by introducing and explaining classic studies, preparing you to seek out and quickly digest future evidence-based medicine information. Highlights the landmark trials that have driven the evolution in medical practice, focusing on the critical information necessary to know about the study. Organizes evidence by disease and further by diagnostic or therapeutic intervention. Includes key takeaways and important notes from trials. Indicates which studies are new or controversial to help you develop an informed perspective. Enhanced eBook version included with purchase, which allows you to access all of the text, figures, and references from the book on a variety of devices.

During the last two decades, the idea of Semantic Web has received a great deal of attention. An extensive body of knowledge has emerged to describe technologies that seek to help us create and use aspects of the Semantic Web. Ontology and agent-based technologies are understood to be the two important technologies here. A large number of articles and a number of books exist to describe the use individually of the two technologies and the design of systems that use each of these technologies individually, but little focus has been given on how one can - sign systems that carryout integrated use of the two different technologies. In this book we describe ontology and agent-based systems individually, and highlight advantages of integration of the two different and complementary te- nologies. We also present a methodology that will guide us in the design of the - tegrated ontology-based multi-agent systems and illustrate this methodology on two use cases from the health and software engineering domain. This book is organized as follows: * Chapter I, Current issues and the need for ontologies and agents, describes existing problems associated with uncontrollable information overload and explains how ontologies and agent-based systems can help address these - sues. * Chapter II, Introduction to multi-agent systems, defines agents and their main characteristics and features including mobility, communications and collaboration between different agents. It also presents different types of agents on the basis of classifications done by different authors.

In recent years American colleges and universities have become the locus of impassioned debates about race-conscious social policies, as conflicting theories clash over the ways to distribute the advantages of higher education in a fair and just manner. Just below the surface of these policy debates lies a complex tangle of ideologies, histories, grievances, and emotions that interfere with a rational analysis of the issues involved. As never before, the need for empirical research on the significance of race in American society seems essential to solving the manifest problems of this highly politicized and emotionally charged aspect of American higher education.
The research evidence presented in this book has a direct relevance to those court cases that challenge race-conscious admission policies of colleges and universities. Though many questions still need to be addressed by future research, the empirical data collected to date makes it clear that affirmative action policies "do" work and are still very much needed in American higher education. This book also provides a framework for examining the evidence pertaining to issues of fairness, merit, and the benefits of diversity in an effort to assist courts and the public in organizing beliefs about race and opportunity.

Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning is a practical guide to keeping ML data anonymous and secure. You'll learn the core principles behind different privacy preservation technologies, and how to put theory into practice for your own machine learning. Complex privacy-enhancing technologies are demystified through real world use cases forfacial recognition, cloud data storage, and more. Alongside skills for technical implementation, you'll learn about current and future machine learning privacy challenges and how to adapt technologies to your specific needs. By the time you're done, you'll be able to create machine learning systems that preserve user privacy without sacrificing data quality and model performance. Large-scale scandals such as the Facebook Cambridge Analytic a data breach have made many users wary of sharing sensitive and personal information. Demand has surged among machine learning engineers for privacy-preserving techniques that can keep users private details secure without adversely affecting the performance of models.

This unique book succinctly summarizes the need to measure how ontologies (one of the building blocks of the Semantic Web) are currently being utilized, providing insights for various stakeholders. Where possible it improves and reuses terms in existing vocabularies/ontologies, as recommended by the Linked Data community. Recent advances in the Semantic Web have led to a proliferation of Resource Description Framework (RDF) data, which employ ontologies to semantically describe the information on the Web making it equally understandable for both humans and machines. However, to create a network effect, it is important that selective ontologies are used by more data publishers to improve the value of that ontology. For this to happen, it is vital to discover what is being used from an ontology to semantically annotate the information on the Web specific to a given domain. Answers to such basic but crucial questions can only be achieved by ascertaining how ontologies in the current semantic web are being utilized and adopted. The proposed frameworks to obtain such insights are explained with real-world examples to provide a clear and detailed description of ontology usage analysis. Both theoretical and practical, the book is of value to academics and professionals working in industry. Specifically, it is of primary interest to researchers, graduate students and practitioners in the area of the Semantic Web and its various real-world applications.

Recent years have seen the development of two significant trends namely: the adoption of some Traditional Chinese Medicine Practices into mainstream Allopathic Western Medicine and the advent of the internet and broad band networks leading to an increased interest in the use of Telemedicine to deliver medical services. In this book, we see the convergence of these two trends leading to a semantically-based TCM Telemedicine system that utilizes an ontology to provide sharable knowledge in the TCM realm to achieve this. The underpinning research required the development of a three-layer architecture and an Ontology of the TCM knowledge. As TCM knowledge like all medical knowledge is not frozen in time it was important to develop an approach that would allow evolution of the Ontology when new evidence became available. In order for the system to be practically grounded it was important to work with an industry partner PuraPharm Group/HerbMiners Informatics Limited. This partnership was initiated through Professor Allan Wong and the Chairman of PuraPharm Group Mr. Abraham Chan. This led to the system being utilized in more than 20 Mobile Clinics in Hong Kong and 300 Hospitals in China. In order for these different deployments of the system to be coherent with the main core Ontology, it was necessary for us to develop an Ontology Driven Software System Generation approach.

Risk and reward are always foremost in the determination of investment decisions and business transactions. Advances in the area of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) have enabled the development of new business paradigms. Such paradigms involve transactions taking place between loosely connected parties, often totally or partially unknown to one another. One important concept required to ensure such transactions are successful is transactional risk. The importance of doing this has been demonstrated in recent financial crisis. This book is unique in simultaneously taking into account the likelihood of an event occurring and its financial impact and provides an integrated discussion of the process of transactional risk identification, assessment, evaluation, management and recording in these emerging domains. It provides a detailed and clear exposition of the importance of transactional risk before detailing for its assessment and evaluation. The scope of the book is theoretical and practical and as such it will have a broad market both within academia and industry. Specifically this book should be of primary interest to researchers, graduate students and practitioners in the area of developing business intelligence techniques and their application in various real world applications.

During the last two decades, the idea of Semantic Web has received a great deal of attention. An extensive body of knowledge has emerged to describe technologies that seek to help us create and use aspects of the Semantic Web. Ontology and agent-based technologies are understood to be the two important technologies here. A large number of articles and a number of books exist to describe the use individually of the two technologies and the design of systems that use each of these technologies individually, but little focus has been given on how one can - sign systems that carryout integrated use of the two different technologies. In this book we describe ontology and agent-based systems individually, and highlight advantages of integration of the two different and complementary te- nologies. We also present a methodology that will guide us in the design of the - tegrated ontology-based multi-agent systems and illustrate this methodology on two use cases from the health and software engineering domain. This book is organized as follows: * Chapter I, Current issues and the need for ontologies and agents, describes existing problems associated with uncontrollable information overload and explains how ontologies and agent-based systems can help address these - sues. * Chapter II, Introduction to multi-agent systems, defines agents and their main characteristics and features including mobility, communications and collaboration between different agents. It also presents different types of agents on the basis of classifications done by different authors.

The development of the Chinese MNC is a new feature of globalization, one that will undoubtedly change the world. Why Chinese firms internationalize, how they do so, and what the impact of their internationalization on developed markets will be are the foci of this book.

The all pervasive web is influencing all aspects of human endeavour. In order to strengthen the description of web resources, so that they are more meaningful to both humans and machines, web semantics have been proposed. These allow better annotation, understanding, search, interpretation and composition of these - sources. The growing importance of these has brought about a great increase in research into these issues. We propose a series of books that will address key issues in web semantics on an annual basis. This book series can be considered as an extended journal published annually. The series will combine theoretical results, standards, and their realizations in applications and implementations. The series is titled "Advances in Web Sem- tics" and will be published periodically by Springer to promote emerging Semantic Web technologies. It will contain the cream of the collective contribution of the Int- national Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Web Semantics Working Group; WG 2. 12 & WG 12. 4. This book, addressing the current state of the art, is the first in the series. In subsequent years, books will address a particular theme, topic or issue where the greatest advances are being made. Examples of such topics include: (i) process semantics, (ii) web services, (iii) ontologies, (iv) workflows, (v) trust and reputation, (vi) web applications, etc. Periodically, perhaps every five years, there will be a scene-setting state of the art volume.

In recent years American colleges and universities have become the locus of impassioned debates about race-conscious social policies, as conflicting theories clash over the ways to distribute the advantages of higher education in a fair and just manner. Just below the surface of these policy debates lies a complex tangle of ideologies, histories, grievances, and emotions that interfere with a rational analysis of the issues involved. As never before, the need for empirical research on the significance of race in American society seems essential to solving the manifest problems of this highly politicized and emotionally charged aspect of American higher education.
The research evidence presented in this book has a direct relevance to those court cases that challenge race-conscious admission policies of colleges and universities. Though many questions still need to be addressed by future research, the empirical data collected to date makes it clear that affirmative action policies "do" work and are still very much needed in American higher education. This book also provides a framework for examining the evidence pertaining to issues of fairness, merit, and the benefits of diversity in an effort to assist courts and the public in organizing beliefs about race and opportunity.

Rectal Cancer: Modern Approaches to Treatment provides a useful overview of the multidisciplinary treatment of rectal cancer with a deeper dive into clinical challenges faced by treating physicians. Written by the leading experts in the field, it provides a practical management guide with an emphasis on the state-of-the-art that will be of value to both novices and experts engaged in rectal cancer treatment.